//------------------------------//
// Chapter 25: Possibly False Hope 
// Story: Harry Potter and the Prancing of Ponies 
// by The Guy Who Writes 
//------------------------------//

Air Bucking.

The final lesson.

...would happen in about thirty minutes, even though class had already started. They had been told that something fun and challenging would come first.

His students were, at the moment, high above him on a platform cloud. They all wore wing-bindings. Twilight and Flight Formation stood nearby on standby, in case anything went wrong.

"Next," he said into his communications necklace.

"AaaaaaaaaaaaAAOOF!"

A pegasus slammed none-too softly into the stadium's centerfield stratus cloud.

"Nope," he said. "You need more practice. Leave your wing bindings here and get to work over there. Flight Formation can help once the test is over."

There was a brief delay as the sour student left the crash zone.

"Next."

"WoooooooooooOOHOO!"

A flawless air cushion.

"That. Was. AWESOME!" 

He'd come to recognize that voice. Scootaloo, top of the class. No surprises there.

"Good job," he congratulated. "You're the third to pass. Take your bindings off and wait over there. We still have a bunch of tests to get through."

There was another brief delay as a student, this one chipper and self-satisfied, left the landing zone.

"Next."







High above...

Mr. Book selected a student at random. His disembodied voice ordered that student to walk to the marked middle of the large, wide cloud that held the entire class. His voice told the student phase through it, informing them to be ready for the cloud directly below. This lower platform was out of sight and sound thanks to the cloud barrier and a muffling charm, though the class didn't know that second part. The student performed a cloud-phase-to-cloud-harden and reached the slightly lower cloud platform.

Mr. Book, ready and waiting, shoved the wing-bound pegasus into free fall without warning. Unless you counted "Think fast," as a warning. Or "Have fun." Or even, "Die," to increase the difficulty of the test for the adult ponies.

Mr. Book had offered to carry out this role free of charge, without his usual fee.







Back below...

"AaaaaaaaaaaaAAOOF!"

"Nope. You need more practice with the air cushion. Please leave your wing bindings here and go to the practice field over there."

"That was not fun."

"It was for me."

The teenager gave him a death glare as he removed the bindings from his wings.

Silver smiled in return. "Flight Formation can help you once the test is over."

Pause.

"Next."







"Believe it or not," Silver posed to the ponies who had passed. They'd been sequestered away to a private airfield, safe from prying ears and scrying eyes. "Air-bucking is probably going to be one of your easier lessons."

"Then why's it last?"

"Because it's dangerous," Silver answered his most inquisitive student. "You know how to glide now, right Scootaloo?" 

"Uh... yup!"

If he had been more attentive, he would have noticed the slight hesitation in her voice.

"Then go ahead and get to work, everypony. Be ready to air cushion if you succeed, then glide back here so you can say how you did it. Same old same old. There's no prize this time, just the feeling of success. Accomplishment is its own reward."

Around ten minutes later, after the first student succeeded (startling the entire class at the sound of the crack) but before she could explain the theory, a much louder thundercrack rang through the stadium. Many eyes were drawn to the orange blur speeding away.

"She isn't switching to a glide," said Rainbow Dash.

The cyan pegasus had been in the middle of a meandering mouthful of an explanation that wouldn't have sufficed and was therefore standing right next to Silver when she made this particular observation.

That was when he noticed. "Oh, crap," he realised. "She was lying. She can't glide."

A crack even louder than Scootaloo's went off right next to him.







"It's fine," Scootaloo told everypony for the millionth time. "I slowed down on my own, didn't I?"

"It. Was. NOT. FINE!" Rainbow Dash shouted for the millionth time. "You could have been KILLED!"

"But I know the air cushion!"

"But you don't know how to FLY! Or even GLIDE!"

"Why does it matter?" Scootaloo asked, feeling her face get hot and her vision get blurry. "Who cares if I can't fly?"

"I care!"

"You don't care enough to teach me!"

"I- I- I tried! Nothing WORKED!"

"Is THAT why you blew me off?!"

"I never blew you off!"

"What about yesterday? And last week? And the week before that?!"

"I was busy!"

"Busy sleeping! Lazy Dash!"

"No, I was working!"

"You can do your work in seconds! You brag about it all the time! Were you working on something else? Like your landings? Rainbow CRASH!"

Something seemed to snap in the cyan pegasus. "Scootalead!"

Scootaloo gasped.

Rainbow did too, quickly covering her mouth.

Scootalead, the lead weight. She'd been called that by some of the other pegasi, especially the jealous ones, before Coach Silver straightened them out.

But they were all mean ponies.

Rainbow Dash wasn't...

Rainbow Dash was...

She felt tears coming to her eyes. She tried to leave before anypony saw her cry, sinking through the floor on instinct.

"Scootaloo, wait! I'm sorry, I didn't mean it!"

She air-bucked downward, used the air cushion to slow her descent long before she reached the ground, then air-bucked in a different direction. It was a cloudy day, so there were plenty of places to hide.







It felt strange, Silver thought, to be a mere witness to the final outburst of a growing drama. It's like he'd been thrust into the climax of a movie without seeing the buildup, the stakes, or the history. But that didn't mean he didn't understand what was going on. Or at least have a good guess.

"Can you get the school nurse?" Silver asked Coach Formation after the class was over. "And tell her to bring her scanning equipment? I want to check something."

"Scootaloo?"

"Yup."

Flight Formation sighed. "The school is closed, but we can go to Cloudsdale hospital. Where is she?"

"Um... busy. But I'm sure she'll turn up eventually. Or be found sooner than that."







Rainbow Dash spent the rest of the day searching. Which wasn't much time, considering that it had already been five o'clock when she started.

Rainbow Dash spent the whole night searching, too.

Well, she tried. She didn't have a watch, but it was probably sometime around three in the morning that she began dozing off mid-flight. She stirred herself awake each time and kept looking. Sleep-flying is dangerous, but she didn't care.

At one point, another pegasus appeared before her.

No, not a pegasus.

An alicorn.

"Remember our surroundings," said Princess Luna. "Look directly below us."

Rainbow obeyed, looking below. They were above Ponyville.

"The one you seek sleeps where I stand. Now please, wake up. And never sleep-fly again."

Rainbow Dash gasped, opened her eyes, performed a death-defying sweep just before she hit the ground, and sped off towards Ponyville.







She was woken up by a hoof and a voice.

"Scootaloo?"

She blinked her eyes open, rather groggily. "Whu? Huh? Rainbow Dash? Why are you-"

And then she remembered.

"Go away."

"No."

"Please go away."

"No, Scootaloo. I'm the Element of Loyalty. I never abandon a friend."

"You're not my friend."

Rainbow winced. "Scootaloo, I didn't mean it."

She crossed her hooves and closed her eyes. "I don't believe you."

There was a long pause.

Rainbow looked at the cloud floor below them.

"I never told you," she said in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. "I never told anypony. Fluttershy's the only one who knows. But did you know that ponies used to bully me for being a bad flyer too?"

Scootaloo's jaw dropped. "You were a bad flyer?"

"The worst," she said. "Well, not really. I could flap my wings and move around just fine. But I didn't pay attention all the time, and I crashed into things, so... yeah. I was a bad flyer."

Scootaloo's eyes were wide. She didn't know if she believed this either, but...

"And you know what they used to call me?"

"What?"

"Rainbow crash." 

Scootaloo gasped. She'd completely forgotten she'd said that. She name-called too.

"When you said that, it just... brought back a lot of bad memories. I'm not trying to make excuses. I never should have said-"

Scootaloo was hugging her. "I'm sorry, Raindbow Dash! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!"

Rainbow hugged her back. "I'm sorry too, squirt."







"It's like you suspected," the doctor said somewhat sadly, but also formally, officially, and with authority. "Textbook wing-magic deficiency."

Silver sighed, Twilight gasped, and Rainbow tilted her head.

"What's that mean, doc?"

"It means she will never fly under her own power. Or even glide. She will be earthbound for the rest of her life."

"Not true," Silver cut off Rainbow Dash before she could express any outward symptoms of the first stage of grief. "She can already get around in the air easily enough."

The doctor tilted her head. "I don't see how that would be possible."

"By using the techniques I taught her."

The doctor still didn't understand.

"The same techniques I used to blow the competition out of the water at the end of last Flight Week."

And that was the moment he was recognized. "You're-"

"Yes. Can we skip this part and go straight to the end? I'd like to know if there are any examples of pegasi overcoming this handicap. If it happened before, it might be possible to replicate."

"I'm... afraid not," said the doctor.

"But I had a magic problem, and I got over it."

"I would need to see your scans," she said skeptically, "but I suspect you did not have this particular deformity. Magic is not getting to her wings at all. The flow is completely cut off. It likely has been since birth. But even if it happened later in her life, no remedies have ever been found to fix it once it sets in."

Silver sighed. "Yeah, that doesn't sound like what I had." He turned to the other adults. Adult, rather. Rainbow Dash had left. "Once Scootaloo is told the bad news, send her my way. There's something I'd like to say to her. In private."







Knock, Knock, Knock.

"Alohamora," he whispered, wand aimed at the Colloportus-ed lock on the door. Then, "Vajinus."

"Silver?" Twilight's voice said from the other side of the door. "I brought Scootaloo."

"Send her in. And please don't eavesdrop."

The door opened and closed. Two pegasi stood in the room, one white and one orange.

"What is it?" asked the orange.

"Just to check," said the white, "they told you the bad news?"

Scootaloo looked at the oaken floor of his room. "Yeah." 

"Then before I say what I want to say, I've got a question. Have you ever heard of the phrase 'false hope'?"

Scootaloo looked at him. "Um... yeah?"

"Do you know what it means?"

Her face screwed up. "I don't think so."

"Then I'll tell you a story so you do. Don't worry, it's important. Once upon a time, a big group of ponies was riding-" planes don't exist here "-a train. At one point, the train stopped moving and caught fire. The conductor told the passengers not to worry, that the fire would be put out and everything was fine. So the passengers stayed where they were. Then a few minutes later the train exploded and everypony died. The end."

Scootaloo scowled. "I don't like that story."

"You shouldn't." Because it's actually much worse. "It's a story about the dangers of false hope." There WAS no crew reassuring the passengers that everything was fine. "It's a story about why hope isn't always a good thing." They just sat there on their own and burned to death thanks to the bystander effect. "The passengers were given false hope by-" complacency "-the conductor. Even though leaving would have been the safe thing to do. They could have gotten back on the train later. But no. Most of them just stayed where they were because they had hope that everything was fine, even though it wasn't. That hope got them killed. In that situation, it was wrong for them to have hope. Now do you see what false hope is?"

"...Yeah. I think so."

"Good. So just keep in mind that before I say anything, I'm warning you up front that it might be a false hope. I don't want you to get convinced that there's some magical answer when there might not be. Understand?"

"I guess?"

"That'll do. One last thing. I need you to promise not to tell anypony... anybody what I'm about to show you. No ponies, no gryphons, no dragons. You'll want to see it, but it has to stay secret. And I mean you can't tell anybody. Not Rainbow Dash, not your friends, the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Not your parents. None. Do you promise?"

"Um... okay. I promise."

"Say the full promise out loud, please. That way I know you're taking this seriously."

She did, looking confused and slightly worried.

"Perfect. I'm trusting you, Scootaloo. Please don't break your promise. If you do, I'm not going to be your friend anymore. I'm not going to talk to you anymore. And that's a promise."

Hopefully that would be enough to overcome the gossip instinct held by young girls that tell all their friends the instant they hear something that comes after the phrase 'this has to stay absolutely secret, understand?'. Judging by Scootaloo's facial expression of worry and fear, it had worked.

"And now that we got that out of the way," he said with a grin to hopefully disperse the tension. "Watch. This." He floated up into the air using his broomstick bones, his flapping appendages pressed firmly to his side. "Look," he said to his shocked audience. "No wings!"

"WOAH!" She began jumping up and down. "Can I do that? Is it another mindset thing? How do I do it? Or do you want me to figure it out on my own again?"

"Excellent questions," said Silver, doing a few twirls as he spoke. "I have no idea, I have no idea, I have no idea, and yes, you do have to figure it out on your own."

Her jumping stopped. "Huh?"

He lowered himself back to the ground. "What I did just now was not pegasus magic. It's something else. You might say that I cheated. But I want you to remember that moment when you thought it was pegasus magic. I want you to remember the questions you asked when you believed it was possible for you to do it too. I want you to remember the hope that you had. And I also want you to remember what I said about false hope."

"Um..." Scootaloo looked a little lost. "Are you being mean?"

"No, I'm being realistic. Think back to my classes. Remember all the stories I told about how I learned what I learned?"

"Yeah?"

"Those stories all had one thing in common," Silver said seriously. "I didn't have somepony telling me that it was possible to air-buck, or cloud-phase, or cloud-harden, or air-cushion. I was working in completely uncharted territory. When I first started out, I had no idea what I was doing and I had to go through a bunch of wrong ideas. I tried to get you to understand what that's like, but there's only so much you can learn from a class. If you want to be able to fly without wings like I just did, using pegasus magic to do it, you'll be doing the exact same thing I do. You'll have to figure things out on your own when you encounter real-world problems that need real-world answers. Like having wings that can't channel magic."

"But... can't you tell me what you did just now?"

"Nope. But I can tell you that it wasn't pegasus magic. I cheated. If it helps, pretend there's an invisible unicorn in the room who cast a levitation spell on me just now. No, that's not what happened, but it's close enough. And I can't arrange for you to get the same... um, spell. You'll be doing it the hard way. The honest way. That means you'll have no clue what the real answer is, and you'll have to do most of the thinking on your own. You'll have to try a bunch of different things, and you're going to fail, over and over again. Don't get discouraged if your first idea doesn't work. Don't get discouraged if your tenth idea doesn't work. If you get it wrong a hundred times, get up and try something new. Like what you're doing with the Cutie Mark Crusaders."

"So... learning to fly is like finding my Cutie Mark?"

"No, I meant it's like how you're trying a bunch of different ideas, and you're still excited to try new things. But this will be slightly different. At least with your Cutie Mark, you're guaranteed to get it eventually, and it could turn out to be a bunch of different things. This isn't a guarantee. You learning how to fly isn't built into the universe like it is for other pegasi. It's not going to happen anyway, like your Cutie Mark. You have to make it true that you can fly. If it's possible, there's probably only one real answer, and it'll take a long time to find that answer. It might be possible to hover around using only pegasus magic and no wings, but I have no idea. And I'm not really motivated enough to do it myself, since my wings are working. Plus, I'm busy. That's why I'll leave it up to you, Scootaloo – the top student in my class, one of the best pegasus magic users in the world – to figure out how to do it. If it's possible. Remember, it might be a false hope. But even if you don't learn out how to levitate, I'm sure you'll figure something out. Just keep in mind that it'll probably take a few years. And keep me posted. I might be able to help. Got it?"

Slowly, Scootaloo's eyebrows furrowed. Slowly, she nodded. Slowly, a certain look entered her eyes.

"Got it."

Silver knew that look anywhere.

"Then get to it," he said, ushering her out of the room. "And don't forget your promise. Don't tell anyone what you saw me do. Even if you figure something out, just say you thought the whole thing up on your own. And if the Element of Honesty points out that you're lying, then be honest and say you made a promise to a friend and you can't say anything else."







"Really?" Twilight asked after Rainbow Dash had finished updating her five friends about Scootaloo.

The flightless filly had reportedly gone from sad and mopey to energetic and determined, and was basically her old self again, only more so.

Twilight looked at Silver, who was reading a book behind a bookshelf in the center room of her public library and definitely wasn't eavesdropping or anything. "What did you tell her?"

"What she needed to hear. Hopefully."

The hug caught him off-guard.

"Whatever it was," said Twilight, "it was the right thing. Good job."